Lonestar State of Mind

chapter 21 A Little Help from my friends

Dean had felt like a parent for a long time. He had felt like a parent to Sam. Raising him in motels while their dad was out hunting, buying groceries, cooking for him and helping him with school work – there had been a lot of responsibility involved, and Dean couldn’t deny he felt like a parent. Sometimes he even resented Sam, even though he knew it wasn’t Sam’s fault.

Dean had never got to be a kid – he had been a parent to Sam when he was supposed to go to prom and play football.

The one time Dean had felt like a normal kid, he’d given it all up for Sammy. When he had stolen food and ended up in that boy's home, with Sonny – Sonny, who had reminded him of Bobby and had actually seemed to care about him for the first time in his life. It was a time Dean didn’t try to think about it because a whole bunch of unresolved feelings over his dad’s treatment of him bubbled up when he did. For so long, Dean had told himself that he deserved it. He told himself it had been normal for his father to say, ‘let him rot in jail’, but it wasn’t. Dean knew that now because he felt like a parent, and he’d walk over hot coals and break whatever rules or laws he needed to when it came to protecting Sam, or Claire, even if that meant protecting them from themselves.

That short time had been golden. Dean had been on the wrestling team. He had been doing well in school for the first time in his life. Then John had come back, and Dean hadn’t wanted to go with him. He had thought about telling Sonny to fight for him, to let him stay and then he had looked at Sam in the back of the Impala, and he had known that he had to go – he had to look after Sammy, it was all he had been doing from the moment Mom died after all.

All of those complicated feelings growing up had made Dean say he would never have kids. Then when he had grown up, he had realised pretty early on that he probably wasn’t going to have the chance to have his own kids anyway. And, if he did, he wasn’t going to see them grow up. A part of him was still convinced that Ben was his son, but he also knew that he and Lisa were far better off without him in their life, so he had closed that door, and he never intended to open it again.

When Jack had come into their lives, Dean had been in a bad place. He hadn’t been in the right headspace to love Jack the way he should have – the way Sam and Cas had. He knew he’d messed up, and with Claire, he wanted to right those wrongs.

He wanted to do better by her than he had with Jack. He wanted to be a good dad. He didn’t want to be anything like John Winchester. Sometimes, when Dean thought about the things he had said to Jack and how he had treated him, he wondered if he was just as bad as the man who had raised him.

All the same, Dean knew what parental love felt like. He knew that unconditional bond, but it never had quite felt that way with Jack. He had felt like that about Sam, and he knew Cas felt that way about Jack.

Claire? Well, she had been a loose cannon. If Dean was honest, he didn’t think he had realised quite how much he cared about Claire until he was standing in front of a relatively drab building with her.

He knew he cared about her and that he wanted the best for her, but he didn’t feel like her dad until that moment – standing at the doors of Austin Fire Academy, seeing Claire off for her first day.